The birth of language ecology: interdisciplinary influences in Einar Haugen's “The ecology of language”

Language Sciences 50 (2015) 78–92

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The birth of language ecology: interdisciplinary influences in Einar Haugen’s “The ecology of language” Stig Eliasson Northern European and Baltic Languages and Cultures (SNEB), Department of English and Linguistics, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany

a r t i c l e i n f o

a b s t r a c t

Article history: Received 25 February 2015 Received in revised form 23 March 2015 Accepted 24 March 2015 Available online 27 April 2015

Einar Haugen is generally regarded as the founding father of ‘language ecology’ or ‘ecology of language’. In his classic 1971 paper, he suggested that “[l]anguage ecology may be defined as the study of interactions between any given language and its environment”. After tracing the roots of language ecology in the social sciences and biology and the use of similar locutions by other linguists before him, the present paper discusses major conceptual and theoretical issues surrounding his proposal. Fundamental discrepancies between how the concept of ecology is understood in biology and sociology, on the one hand, and the attempted application to language, on the other, render details of Haugen’s framework disputed. In particular, it is difficult to transpose the three central bio-ecological concepts of organism, environment, and relationship/interaction to human language, and in his ecological-linguistic work, Haugen wavers between placing the focus on the interaction, on the interrelation, and on the ‘organism’, i.e. in his case language. He primarily treats language ecology as a metaphor, but occasionally speaks of language ecology as a scientific field. Moreover, as its object of study is not sharply delimited, its relations to other research objectives or neighboring disciplines are unclear. Furthermore, the grand scope of his program often entails severe difficulties in actual research that is limited in time and by available resources. In principle, however, the holistic, multi-faceted and dynamic perspective of his approach constitutes a valuable corrective to linguistic approaches concentrating one-sidedly on language as an autonomous, static, synchronically quasi-invariable system. This fact provides a major reason for the notable impact of his 1971 article on subsequent sociologically and ecologically oriented linguistic research. Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Language ecology Ecolinguistics Conceptual and theoretical issues Interdisciplinary influences History and philosophy of language studies Einar Haugen

1. Introduction1 The notion ecology of language or language ecology was seriously launched at the beginning of the 1970s by the American linguist Einar Haugen (1906–1994), who gave the following description: “Language ecology may be defined as the study of interactions between any given language and its environment” (Haugen, 1971 [1972, 325]). He elaborates his idea in slightly greater detail (Haugen, 1971 [1972, 325]; cited here as separate points and with my italics, SE):

1

E-mail address: [email protected]. This article is an adapted English translation of an address to the Royal Society of Humanities at Uppsala in April 2013, published as Eliasson (2014).

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2015.03.007 0388-0001/Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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The true environment of a language is the society that uses it as one of its codes.
Language exists only in the minds of its users, and it only functions in relating these users to one another and to nature, i.e. their social and natural environment.
Part of its ecology is therefore psychological: its interaction with other languages in the minds of bi- and multilingual speakers.
Another part of its ecology is sociological: its interaction with the society in which it functions as a medium of communication.
The ecology of a language is determined primarily by the people who learn it, use it, and transmit it to others. The aim of this paper is to sketch the background of Haugen’s ecological-linguistic program, to discuss major interdisciplinary influences on his approach, and to outline some of its conceptual and theoretical problems. First, I trace some steps of the spread of the concept of ecology from zoology to botany, home economics, geography, social sciences, and linguistics (Section 2). Secondly, I consider the institutional setting, within which Haugen initially presented his idea of an ecology for human languages (Section 3) and his sources of inspiration, insofar as these can be discerned in his article (Section 4). Topics of the two following sections are the ecological metaphor that he created (Section 5) and his ten ecological-linguistic research questions (Section 6). Next, I discuss to what extent Haugen has taken over bio-ecological terminology and how he interprets the central ecological concepts of organism, environment, and relationship/interaction (Section 7). Themes of the four subsequent sections are the varying foci of his definitions of language ecology (Section 8), how he perceives the scope of his object of study (Section 9), how language ecology relates to other branches of scientific inquiry (Section 10) as well as what importance he attaches in his article to theory, model construction, methodology, and heuristic function (Section 11). By way of conclusion I provide a summary comment on Haugen’s ecological-linguistic project (Section 12). In the first place I concentrate on Haugen’s primary article on the topic, Haugen (1971), reprinted as Haugen (1972). Since the 1972 reprint has long been easier to access, scholars have tended to cite that version, and I adhere to this practice here. Where relevant, I also refer to other contributions by Haugen, particularly his two other papers on language ecology (Haugen, 1979a, b). Garner (2004, 2005), Lechevrel (2009, 2010a, b), and Eliasson (2013), among others, deal with further aspects of Haugen’s ecological-linguistic thinking. For reasons of space, I cannot enter upon how later research has developed Haugen’s ideas.2

2. Emergence and diffusion of the modern concept and term ‘ecology’ The beginnings of ecological ways of thinking can be traced far back in time (Trepl, 1987; Morgenthaler, 2000), but the term itself is not attested until 1866. True, basing himself on the OED Supplement (1972), Goodland (1975a and 1975b, 242) submits that the American author and philosopher of nature Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) used the term even earlier, viz., in a letter of January 1, 1858. In Harding and Bode’s edition of Thoreau’s correspondence, the passage in question reads: “Mr Hoar is still in Concord, attending to Botany, Ecology, &c with a view to make his future residence in foreign parts more truly profitable to him” (Harding and Bode, 1958, 502). The same information about Thoreau’s use of the word surfaces in Barnhart (1988, 313) and several later works. For instance, referring to Morgenthaler (2000, 250), Liimatainen (2008, 41) says that “Thoreau was . the first to use the word ecology in the sense of a specialty within the natural sciences”.3 However, Thoreau’s handwriting is at times hard to interpret. In actual fact, in 1965 in Science, Harding had revised his earlier reading “Ecology” (Harding, 1965; cf. also McIntosh, 1975, 1985, 19). The grounds for Harding’s correction were that botanists in the US had simplified the original spelling “oecology” to “ecology” only in 1893, that “several times in his Journal that winter Thoreau mentioned Hoar’s interest in rocks and quarries”, and that the word in Thoreau’s letter could also be read “Geology”! To boot, Roger Gyllin (p.c. 12/22/2013) points out that in the decades following the publication of Charles Lyell’s revolutionary three-volume work Principles of geology (1830–1833), the science of geology was very much in vogue, in the scientific world as well as among the general public, making it a much more likely discipline to cite than ecology. With good reason, therefore, Kluge (2011, 668) informs us that “the alleged earlier attestation in H. D. Thoreau is due to a misreading”. Hence, the German professor of zoology in Jena, Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) remains the creator of the term ecology and is supposed to have coined it on the analogy of the designations ‘economy’ and ‘biology’ (Straub et al. 1989, 478, 483). In his monumental work Generelle Morphologie der Organismen (1866), he gives the following definition (Haeckel, 1866, vol. 2, 286; spacing omitted):

2 On ecolinguistics, an enterprise that proceeds in partly different directions than Haugen’s original program, see Fill (1993, 1998), Fill and Mühlhäusler (2001), Verhagen (2000), Bang and Døør (2007), García Lenza (2011), Couto (2014), and Steffensen and Fill (2014). For instance, Verhagen (1991, 28 and 2000, 35) defines ecolinguistics as the “scientific study of language that 1) observes and researches how language affects and is affected by past and present ecological values, attitudes, activities and 2) devises lexical and syntactical strategies for the emergent ecological age based upon a postmodern, ecological world view that is bio- or geocentric rather than anthropocentric”. Note also Skutnabb-Kangas (2011) and Wendel (2005).dOn the development of the biological concept of ecology, see McIntosh (1985), Trepl (1987), and Morgenthaler (2000), on theory formation in ecology Scheiner and Willig (2011). 3 Translations from German, Danish, and Galician in this paper are by myself.

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Unter Oecologie verstehen wir die gesammte Wissenschaft von den Beziehungen des Organismus zur umgebenden Aussenwelt, wohin wir im weiteren Sinne alle „Existenz-Bedingungen“ rechnen können. Diese sind theils organischer, theils anorganischer Natur; sowohl diese als jene sind . von der grössten Bedeutung für die Form der Organismen, weil sie dieselbe zwingen, sich ihnen anzupassen. [By ecology we understand the total science of the relations of the organism to the surrounding outside world, to which we can, in a broad sense, count all “conditions of existence”. These are in part of organic, in part of non-organic nature; both the former and the latter are . of utmost importance to the form of the organisms, because they force this to adapt itself to them.] In the first volume of his work (Haeckel, 1866, vol. 1, 8), he describes ecology as “the science of the economy of the organisms, of the way of life, of the external life relations of the organisms to one another, etc.” Nonetheless, Haeckel did not elaborate the topic further, and his idea of a scientific ecological discipline was overshadowed by the debates about Darwinism that ensued upon the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the origin of species in the year 1859 (Park et al., 1969, 913). Without citing Haeckel (1866) on this particular point, Hanns Reiter thus reintroduces the coinage ecology a few decades later in Die Consolidation der Physiognomik als Versuch einer Oekologie der Gewaechse (1885). Reiter speaks of a branch of biology that “still completely lacks a special name suitable for it”, but for which he wants to “propose the designation ecology . or the study of housekeeping” (Reiter, 1885, 5; boldface in the original). According to Reiter (1885, 4), ecology “takes as its starting point the forms of the adaptation that the connection between variability and the natural conditions of existence has brought about”. Yet, only in the 1890s is ecology put on a firmer scientific foundation, and the term thereby gains wider acceptance within biology. One of the truly prominent figures in this development is the Danish botanist Eugenius Warming (1841– 1924), author of the seminal work Plantesamfund. Grundtræk af den økologiske Plantegeografi (1895) that was soon translated into several languages d into English under the title Oecology of plants. An introduction to the study of plantcommunities (1909).4 Warming (1909, 2) sums up the task of ecological plant-geography in the following way (bold-face in the original): Oecological plant-geography . teaches us how plants or plant-communities adjust their forms and modes of behaviour to actually operating factors, such as the amounts of available water, heat, light, nutriment, and so forth. The English translation of Warming’s work reflects the formulation of the definition in the Danish original (Warming, 1895, 2),5 but the German translations of 1918 and 1933 add d beyond forms and modes of behavior d the important factor geographical distribution (“ihre Gestalt, ihre Haushaltung und ihre Verteilung auf der Erde”, Warming and Graebner, 1918, 2 and Warming and Graebner, 1933, 4). From zoology and botany, the concept of ecology enters other scientific and applied scientific areas. In a booklet entitled Sanitation in daily life (1907), the American chemist Ellen Swallow Richards uses the expression “human ecology” about the immediate surroundings of humans (cf. also McIntosh, 1985, 20, Merchant, 2007, 179, 180–181). Richards (1907, v) says: Human ecology is the study of the surroundings of human beings in the effects they produce on the lives of men. The features of the environment are natural, as climate, and artificial, produced by human activity, as noise, dust, poisonous vapors, vitiated air, dirty water, and unclean food. In the following year, the sociologist E. C. Hayes (1908, 39) cites a personal letter from the geographer and cartographer Paul Goode, in which the latter refers to “[h]uman ecology, a study of the geographic conditions of human culture”. Gross (2004, 583) submits that “[t]his seems to be the first time that the term human ecology was discussed in a scholarly magazine, the American Journal of Sociology”. The term also appears in Moore (1920, 4), who, giving an example from sanitation, states that “[g]eography, in so far as it is the study of man in relation to his environment, is human ecology”. Turning to a key publication in early twentieth-century sociology, Robert Park and Ernest Burgess employ the expression “Human Ecology” in their comprehensive Introduction to the science of sociology (1921), a kind of anthology that assembles sociologically relevant text excerpts from many different sources (Park and Burgess, 1930, 559 [1921, 588]; cf. Schnore, 1958, 620, n. 1). Young (1974, 5) observes that “Park and Burgess and, a little later, [their student Roderick D.] McKenzie, are widely recognized as the ‘founders’ of human ecology”. Strikingly, however, “[a]lthough Park and Burgess in their Introduction included the writings of many biologists, they did not include . passages where human ecology was discussed” (Gross, 2004, 594). Later, among others, the American sociologist Amos Hawley (1910–2009) uses the term, arguing that ecology basically adopts a sociological perspective of its object of study.6 In his 1950 study Human ecology. A theory of community structure, he writes (Hawley, 1950, 67f.; my italics, SE):

4

The original Danish title literally means Plant communities. Basic features of ecological plant-geography. “Den økologiske Plantegeografi . belærer os om, hvorledes Planterne og Plantesamfundene indrette deres Form og Husholdning efter den Mængde af Varme, Lys, Næring, Vand m. m., som staaer til deres Raadighed .” (spacing omitted). 6 Cf. the phytosociology of Braun-Blanquet (1928). When Hawley (1950, 8) remarks that ”[t]he term human ecology made its appearance in 1921 in the volume, An introduction to the science of sociology by R. E. Park and E. W. Burgess”, he is apparently unaware of, or disregards, its pre-1921 occurrences. 5

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The subject of ecological enquiry is . the community, the form and development of which are studied with particular reference to the limiting and supporting factors of the environment . [Ecology] attempts to determine the nature of community structure in general, the types of communities that appear in different habitats, and the specific sequence of change in community development. The unit of observation . is not the individual but the aggregate which is either organized or in process of becoming organized. . Ecology . is virtually synonymous with what plant ecologists call “synecology”dthe study of the interrelations among organisms . However, what plant ecologists term “autoecology”dthe study of the adaptations made by the individual organism throughout its life history .dis excluded from the conception as set forth in these pages. . It is to be emphasized that ecology in all its applications necessarily involves a sociological, not a biological, enquiry. . [W]e wish . to underscore the essentially sociological background of human ecology. Psychology, too, adopts the term ecology (see, e.g., Young, 1974, 23–27), in part in somewhat special meanings. Thus Brunswik (1943, 259, n. 2) characterizes psychological ecology as “a statistical analysis of intra-environmental correlations” and ecological psychology as “the organism’s proper adjustment to such correlations, to be expressed in terms of achievement”.7 Moreover, the psychologist James Gibson’s (1904–1979) ecological theory of perception is widely known (Gibson, 1966).8 Barker and Wright’s (1954) psychological ecology, on the other hand, is strongly focused on the analysis of behavior settings in the outside world. In linguistics, the expression ‘language ecology’ is above all associated with Einar Haugen. Some scholars even claim that he was the first one to relate the notion of ecology to linguistic phenomena. With Haugen in mind, Fill (1993, 1) states that “the concept of ‘ecology’ was applied to language for the first time in 1970”. With a similar wording and referring to Fill (1993), Liimatainen (2008, 569) says that “the concept of ‘ecology’ was applied to language for the first time in 1970 by Einar Haugen”. Yet, later in his text, Fill actually modifies his statement (Fill, 1993, 11). Haugen himself informs us that he had eventually noticed that the word ecology had already been employed in a linguistic context by the linguist and anthropologist Carl Voegelin and co-workers in two contributions published in 1964 and 1967, the latter article according to Haugen written before the first one. Voegelin and Voegelin (1964, 2) describe linguistic ecology as follows: linguistic ecology . represents a shift of emphasis from a single language in isolation to many languages in contact . In linguistic ecology, one begins not with a particular language but with a particular area, not with selective attention to a few languages but with comprehensive attention to all the languages in the area. Moreover, the Voegelins distinguish between “interlanguage ecology” (languages in contact) and “intralanguage ecology” (dialects in contact) (Voegelin and Voegelin, 1964, 3). Finally, Voegelin et al. (1967, 405) state that they “restrict [their] use of the term ECOLOGICAL to language-culture societies or situations which are bilingual or trilingual”. Haugen indicates in his essay that “[t]he only previous use of ‘ecology’ in relation to languages . is that made by the Voegelins and Noel W. Schutz, Jr.” (Haugen, 1972, 327; italics by SE). In accordance with this, Grenoble (2011, 30) still says that “[t]he term LANGUAGE ECOLOGY . dates back to Voegelin et al. (1967) and is generally associated with Haugen (1972)”. Similarly, the Galician researcher García Lenza (2011, 494) writes: Existe un consenso xeneralizado en considerar ó sociolingüista de orixe norueguesa E. Haugen fundador da ecoloxía lingüística, coa conferencia «The ecology of language», presentada en 1970 e publicada en 1972 nunha colección de ensaios á que lle presta título. Non obstante, Voegelin & Voegelin (1964) foron os primeiros en usar o termo ecoloxía en relación coas linguas, malia que sen afondar nel desde o punto de vista teórico . [There is a general consensus in considering the sociolinguist of Norwegian descent, E. Haugen, the founder of linguistic ecology, with the paper “The ecology of language” presented in 1970 and published in 1972 in a collection of essays, to which it lends the title. However, Voegelin & Voegelin (1964) were the first ones to use the term ecology in relation to languages, even though without delving into it from a theoretical point of view .] But Haugen’s assertion appears to be limited to the North American linguistic scene. For, as several scholars note, the Englishman John Trim (1924–2013) used the expression “linguistic ecology” already at the end of the 1950s.9 Trim, who pointed to the essential role of variation in language, defines linguistic ecology as “[t]he study of variation within a speech community and its function” (Trim, 1959, 24) or more specifically as “the establishment of . the conditions of usage and balance [in a linguistic community, SE] of apparently competing forms” (Trim, 1959, 9). Besides, even in the U.S., the psycholinguist Vivian Horner made use of the phrase “linguistic ecology” already in the 1960s, albeit only in passing (Horner, 1968, cf. also Horner and Gussow, 1972). As for Trim’s paper, neither Voegelin et al. (1967) and Voegelin and Voegelin (1964), nor Haugen (1972) seem to know about it. Nor does Haugen include it in the lists of references of his later articles on language ecology (1979a, b).

7 On the labels ecology and ecological, cf. in addition Brunswik (1943 267, n. 3 and 271, n. 8). Brunswik (1947, 37) and (1956, 38) comments on the notions of ‘ecological validity’ and ‘ecological generality’, respectively. 8 A much later work is Gibson (1979). Lang (1984) and Neisser (1999) discuss the meanings of the word ecology in psychology. 9 Cf. van Lier (2000, 251), Spolsky (2004, 7), Hornberger and Hult (2008, 280), Hult (2009, 88), and Skutnabb-Kangas (2011, 177).

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Table 1 The appearance of the term ‘ecology’ in biology and examples of its adoption by other scientific fields. Biology, etc. 1866 1885 1895 1907

1908

Sociology

Psychology

Linguistics

Haeckel (zoology) Reiter (botany) Warming (botany) Richards uses the term human ecology in relation to the immediate human surroundings Goode (about the “geographic conditions of human culture”)

1921

Park & Burgess bring the term human ecology to prominence in sociology

1943, 1947, 1956

1950 1954

Brunswik: psychological ecology; ecological psychology, etc. Hawley’s Human ecology Barker & Wright: psychological ecology

1959

Trim’s linguistic ecology (variation in the speech community) Voegelin’s linguistic ecology (languages/dialects in contact in a given geographical area)

1964, 1967

1966 (cf. also 1979) 1968, 1972 1971, 1972

Gibson: ecological optics Horner: linguistic ecology Haugen’s ecology of language

Table 1 summarizes schematically some of the steps of the spread of the term ecology from zoology and botany to other sciences.10 After this overview, let us now look a bit more closely at Haugen’s conception. 3. The setting of Haugen’s original presentation The origin of Haugen’s famous article from 1971/1972 was a talk entitled “On the ecology of languages”, which he delivered at a conference at Burg Wartenstein, Austria, in 1970. The gathering “Toward the Description of the Languages of the World” (Burgoyne, 1971) was the second one of two meetings in that year, organized by the Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL) in Washington, D.C., with the aim of “developing an international plan to describe the languages of the world” (Lewis, 1971, 7). Beside Haugen, the participants at Burg Wartenstein included, for instance, the general linguist E. M. Uhlenbeck, the sociolinguist Charles Ferguson, the tagmemicist Kenneth Pike, the language geographer and specialist in New Guinean and Australian languages Stephen Wurm, the historical and general linguist Werner Winter, and the Japanologist Shirô Hattori. From the present-day perspective, it may seem odd that no generativists or theoretical linguists participated in the symposium. In part, the skewed composition of the group is very likely explained by the fact that generativists in those days generally took up a highly negative attitude to language typology and sociolinguistics, to say nothing about research on the global inclusion of language into the structure of society.11 Noteworthy is also that the two CAL conferences came about as a part of the preliminary preparations for a larger investigatory project. For this reason, Haugen probably did not intend his talk as a systematic exposition of its subject area, but more as the rudimentary and provisional sketch that it actually is. In consequence, the talk was first published in the informal newsletter The Linguistic Reporter rather than in a stringently elaborated form in an established professional journal such as Language. 4. Haugen’s sources of inspiration From where did Haugen get his idea of language ecology? According to the Danish ecolinguist Sune Vork Steffensen “the Norwegian-American linguist Einar Haugen (cf. Haugen, 1972) made a successful transference of Haeckel’s concept to the sphere of language, probably under the influence of his famous compatriot, and father of deep ecology/ecological philosophy

10 Bather (1902) wrote that “‘œcology’ is, and no doubt will long remain a purely technical term”, but this situation changed in the 1960s. Outside of strictly scientific discourse, the word ecology nowadays, of course, often occurs in a transferred sense. In German, Straub et al. (1989, 484) distinguish all in all four important kinds of usages: “In public texts, ecology is used to designate (a) a sphere of political action, (b) a societal-political movement, (c) a more or less scientifically founded doctrine, and (d) individual natural households [i.e., ecosystems, SE]”. An impression of how the word ecology and related expressions have spread may be gained from the datasets assembled by Google by using the Google Books Ngram Viewer (https://books.google.com/ ngrams; Michel et al., 2011). 11 Witness, e.g., Chomsky’s famed pronouncement on sociolinguistics (Chomsky, 1977, 57; on the contrast to Haugen, cf. Eliasson, 2013, 46).

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(or ecosophy), the Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss” (Steffensen, 2007, 5). Likewise, Steffensen and Fill (2014, 8) hold that “Haugen was arguably under the influence of the Norwegian philosopher and deep ecologist, Arne Næss”. Steffensen does not present specific facts or references to underpin his interesting suggestion. As for the point in time, Arne Næss (1912–2009) presumably entertained ecological ideas earlier than Haugen, something which renders an influence chronologically possible. Drengson (2008, 6) says, for instance, that since the mid 1960s Næss directed his energies increasingly towards environmental questions. On the other hand, it is often assumed that Næss coined the special, widely celebrated designation ‘deep ecology’ only in September 1972 in a talk in Bucharest (cf. Næss, 2008 and Anker, 2008), and its international diffusion followed the publication of his now classical article, Næss (1973). This piece, however, was published three years after Haugen’s talk at Burg Wartenstein and two years after Haugen’s original ecology paper had first appeared. Haugen himself does not refer to Næss and his exposition includes no unambiguous traces of precisely Næss’s thinking. The titles that Haugen mentions in his list of references are distributed on research areas in the way indicated in Table 2. Whereas publications in philosophy and psychology as well as Haeckel’s and Warming’s works in biology are totally absent, Haugen lists three contributions to human ecology and no less than sixteen titles in the sociology of language, research on bilingualism, etc. Among the non-linguists that he includes in his bibliography are the American sociologists Amos Hawley, August Hollingshead, Everett Hughes and George Theodorson along with the American entomologist and ecologist Orlando Park d the latter in his capacity as the main author of the article on ecology in Encyclopædia Britannica (cf. Park et al. 1969). Without specifically referring to their writings in his bibliography, Haugen speaks of “[p]ioneers in the field [of human ecology] like [Robert] Park, Burgess, McKenzie .” (1972, 328). He further honors Hawley’s work Human ecology by mentioning its title both in the text and in the bibliography (1972, 327, 338). The same goes for Everett Hughes’ sociological study French Canada in transition (Hughes, 1943; see Haugen, 1972, 328, 338). In addition, with specific reference to human ecology, he points out that “[l]anguage ecology would be a natural extension of this kind of study” (1972, 327). Likewise, the parallel that he draws to his own transfer of the notion of ecology to linguistics is a sociological one, viz., the extension of ecology from biology to human ecology in a sociological sense (1979b, 244): There is precedent for such an extension in the development of ‘human ecology’, a branch of sociology which is defined (. by Webster) as ‘the study of the spatial and temporal interrelationships between men and their economic, social, and political organization’. Furthermore, following an inquiry of mine, Dr. Camilla Cai, Professor emerita at Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio, USA, and daughter of Einar Haugen, informs me that in the late 1960s she had a long conversation with her father about ecology, but that she does not recall the name Arne Næss (or Ernst Haeckel, for that matter) from this conversation. On the other hand, she recalls that her father had noticed that the word ecology had gained a footing with the general public (p.c., 9/21/2013): I do remember a conversation we had, it must have been the late 60s because it was before he published The Ecology of Language. I had come across the word ”ecology” and was fascinated by it, having not heard the concept before. It was becoming a fashionable word and seemed important (though I was a musician, not a scientist). He also had noticed its appearance among the general public, and we continued that evening with a spirited conversation about the word and its meanings. I would not, for a moment, suggest that I triggered his interest in the concept. I am sure he discussed it with others, but, I really think it was his own fascination with what the word could be used for, beyond its literal meaning in science . Finally, in his review of Enninger and Haynes’ (1984) collection entitled Studies in language ecology, Haugen observes about the volume and its principal topic (Haugen, 1987b, 81): The idea of “language ecology“ is seen as the “unifying theme“ and it clearly seems to have inspired a variety of approaches. . I can survey the contributions and indicate to what extent they really appear to fulfill the idea I had in proposing the term. I suppose it was the popularity of the “ecological movement“ in modern life that suggested its use. It seemed to me that there were many parallels in the current concerns about plant and animal species to the linguists’ concerns about the life and death of languages. Even though Haugen’s formulation does not exclude the possibility of other sources, the quote makes no mention of anything else than the ecology movement and, in a very general sense, biology. Possibly, a consultation of Haugen’s unpublished scientific materials and correspondence at Harvard and in Trondheim (see Eliasson, 2013, 16) might shed further light on the question whether he was influenced also by Næss. Judging from his central ecology article and lacking supplementary information, it appears more likely that he got the idea on home ground in the U.S. than that he was inspired by Næss in Norway. Table 2 Entries in Haugen’s list of references (1972, 337–339) grouped according to scientific fields. Ecology (article in encyclopedia) Sociology Human ecology Psychology Philosophy

1 1 3 – –

Sociolinguistics, sociology of language, ethnolinguistics, bilingualism

16

Study of foreign accent as a special linguistic variety

1

Contrastive linguistics

1

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Nor do we in Haugen’s paper find traces of the psychologists’ use of the term ecology (such as those of Brunswik, Barker and Wright, Gibson, and others). Conceivably, he considered some of these usages too special for meriting comment in an analysis of linguistic phenomena. As regards linguistics, he says in a later article, published in a tagmemic journal, that the approach of language ecology was partly inspired by Kenneth Pike, who through his tagmemics (Pike, 1967) tries to create a “unified theory of the structure of human behavior” (Haugen, 1979a [1987a, 27]). Besides, the contents of Haugen’s language ecology overlap with geolinguistics. Geolinguistics, launched in the 1960s by Mario Pei (1901–1978), is a research field that investigates how languages are distributed on Earth, what weight they carry in different respects (politically, economically, culturally, etc.), how they influence each other, and so forth (Pei, 1965, 2–3). More generally, Steffensen (2007, 7) notes that a dogma has arisen in ecolinguistic circles that Haugen and Halliday (see Halliday, 1990) gave birth to two separate directions within ecolinguistics. Steffensen (2007, 8) correctly points out that “[w]hat Haugen and Halliday did was to articulate thoughts and feelings circulating at these particular points in history”. Nevertheless, Haugen was the first one to tackle the concept of language ecology at some length. 5. The ecological metaphor In his 1972 paper, Haugen stages his proposal against the background of three broad, successive currents in earlier linguistic science: historical comparative linguistics, structuralism, and generative grammar. He does so by presenting four metaphors for the investigation of human language, three of which had figured in previous literature and one that is his own (Table 3). Because Haugen introduces language ecology in the form of a metaphor, later researchers usually emphasize this side of his proposal. It is true that Haugen describes ecology in a biological sense as a “science” (1972, 327, 329 twice), but the scientific approach of one academic field could, of course, serve as a metaphor in another area. Perhaps, the idea of language ecology as a metaphor also underlies Haugen’s declaration that “‘language ecology’ is . one aspect [italics, SE] of the interdisciplinary field of sociolinguistics or the sociology of language” (1979b, 245), even though the statement does not seem to tally fully with the reverse assertion that “sociolinguistics is an ‘ecology of language’” (1978, 7). Additional support for the view that the expression ‘language ecology’ is a metaphor rather than the name of a discipline might be that Haugen obviously regards the ecological metaphor as a useful tool of thought and a valuable heuristic instrument (cf. 1972, 326f.). Moreover, it is tempting to compare with Camilla Cai’s observation cited above (Section 4) about her father’s “fascination with what the word could be used for, beyond its literal meaning in science” (italics, SE). Nevertheless, it also happens that Haugen speaks of language ecology as a “field of study” (1979b, 243; see also 1972, 328). Furthermore, he argues that language ecology “should form a significant part of a complete science of sociology” (1979b, 245; italics, SE). Camilla Cai, in fact, thinks that “[h]e thought of ecology of language as more than just a metaphor” (p.c., 5/12/2013). Hence, in some measure he appears to vacillate between regarding language ecology as a metaphor and as a scientific discipline (also see Section 6). The earlier metaphors have according to Haugen not been successful (1972, 326f., 1979b, 244f., see also 1973, 48). He seems aware that his own, ecological, metaphor, too, has its limitations (cf. 1972, 244, 245), but evidently thinks that the advantages of the new metaphor outweigh its disadvantages.

6. Haugen’s ecological-linguistic research questions Yet, a metaphor by itself clearly does not suffice for analyzing linguistic phenomena, but must be made concrete. To serve ecological-linguistic investigations, Haugen therefore compiles a set of research questions, which at the same time delineate the projected contents of his ecological-linguistic approach. In Haugen (1979b, 246), he explicitly talks about “ten kinds of data . for an adequate ecology of any language” (italics, SE). I reproduce his ten “ecological questions” (1972, 336), with slight modifications, in Table 4. Haugen’s overview of the tasks that fall upon an adequate language ecology includes many interesting problems, which I cannot touch upon here. However, one general observation is that in this discussion he appears to regard language ecology more as a perspective than as a special scientific discipline or sub-discipline (cf. Section 5). Another observation is that he pulls together a number of tasks from different, usually linguistic, fields under one and the same ecological roof. Above all, his language ecology reflects issues from sociologically oriented investigations into language, that is, from “work on language change and variability, on language contact and bilingualism, and on standardization” (1972, 327). To what degree

Table 3 Metaphors in the language sciences according to Haugen (1972, 326f.). Metaphor

Definition

School

(a)

Biological metaphor

Language viewed as an organism that lives, reproduces and dies

Historical-comparative linguistics during the 19th century onwards

(b) (c) (d)

Instrumental metaphor Structural metaphor Ecological metaphor

Language as an instrument or a tool Language as a tightly organized system of mutually related parts Language seen as an organism in its natural environment

Structuralism and generative grammar Haugen’s own metaphor

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Table 4 Haugen’s ten research questions for ecological linguistic analysis of a given language (summary of Haugen, 1972, 336f.; some questions slightly paraphrased). Ecological-linguistic research question according to Haugen:

Responsible sub-discipline of linguistic science:

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9)

Historical and descriptive linguistics Linguistic demography Sociolinguistics Dialinguisticsa Dialectology Philology Prescriptive linguistics, traditional grammar, lexicology Glottopolitics Ethnolinguistics

(10) a b

How is the language classified in relation to other languages? Who are its users? What are its domains of use? What other languages do its speakers employ? What internal varieties does the language show? What is the nature of its written traditions? To what degree has its written form been standardized, i.e., unified and codified? What kinds of institutions regulate and propagate the language? What are the attitudes of its users towards the language, in terms of intimacy and status, leading to personal identification? Where does the language stand and where is it going in comparison with the other languages of the world?

Typology of ecological classification [of languages]b

Haugen (1957 [reprint 1972, 331]) uses the designation dialinguistics as a synonym for “bilingual description”. Haugen (1972, 327).

representatives of the different areas mentioned (i.e., grammarians, lexicologists, historical linguists, philologists, etc.) would tend to classify the relevant research topics as ecological remains, nevertheless, obscure (further see Section 10). A more specific thing relating to Haugen’s first research question is that he regards language classification as a matter for historical and descriptive linguistics. Classifying a given language structurally is then a task for descriptive linguistics. From a modern point of view, it is striking that he leaves out language typology, which is nowadays a large and prominent research area (cf., e.g., Song, 2011). Still, the concept was not as current in those days as it is now, a fact that is mirrored in the standard introductions to linguistics of that time. Only quite sporadically does the word typology surface in Hockett (1965, 92, 620), and it is conspicuously absent in the subject index of Gleason (1961, 502). Gleason calls his book An introduction to descriptive linguistics and explains what he means by descriptive linguistics Gleason (1961, 440; italics, SE): Descriptive linguistics is concerned with two very different but intimately related tasks: The first is to describe individual languages or dialects in terms of their own characteristic structure. . The second task of descriptive linguistics is to develop a general theory of language structure d that is, to set up a conceptual framework within which an investigator can work as he seeks to understand a specific language. This theory must be sufficiently general and flexible to provide for any type of language structure that may be encountered, but also sufficiently precise and systematic to give real help. When Haugen formulates his first ecological-linguistic question, it is conceivable that he views the role of descriptive linguistics in a similar way as Gleason. Yet, he was hardly unaware of the ideas that were beginning to emerge and that eventually would lead to modern language typology. For one thing, he participated in the innovating symposium on linguistic universals that formed the basis for Joseph Greenberg’s celebrated collection Universals of language (Greenberg, 1963), in which the notion typology sometimes appeared. For another thing, the area of “language typology” or “typology” figures in the reports from the two CAL conferences, in which Haugen took part (Burgoyne, 1971, 6 and Lewis, 1971, 8, respectively). The fact that Haugen omits typology among the fields responsible for answering his first research question is perhaps also motivated by the general doubts about the capacity of language typology that Lewis depicts in her report (Lewis, 1971, 8): Another question raised concerned the criteria that should be used to select the languages and organize the data. The majority of those present favored a genetic classification. Even those who favored typology agreed that studies in that field are not so advanced as genetic studies and that its use would present too many difficulties. Conversely, Haugen somewhat surprisingly applies the term typology in connection with his tenth research question, which involves not structural, but ecological-linguistic classification or taxonomy, in other words, “a universal scheme of ecological classification of languages” (1972, 332). 7. Haugen’s adoption of ecological terminology and his interpretation of the concepts organism, environment, and relationship/interaction As is evident, e.g., from the classical, encyclopedic work Principles of animal ecology (Allee et al. 1949), biological ecology has developed a truly impressive number of concepts and principles. Some of these have inspired, or have been adopted and modified by, human ecology (e.g., Hawley, 1950). Which are, in turn, the ecological and human ecological concepts that Haugen has borrowed? First, we observe that on the whole Haugen employs an extremely limited ecological vocabulary. That he does not find a place for phenomena such as biological reproduction is self-evident. In Haugen (1973, 48), he says: “there is nothing at all in language that is identical with biological descent”. It is remarkable, though, that he does not expressly mention or comment on central ecological terms such as ecosystem, density, distribution, niche, maladaptation, and so forth. Even though much of

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ABIOTIC ENVIRONMENT

Ecology

ORGANISM

RELATION BIOTIC ENVIRONMENT

Language ecology

LINGUISTIC COMMUNITY LANGUAGE

INTERACTION MIND

Fig. 1. Central concepts in Haeckel’s ecology and in Haugen’s ecology of language.

the contents behind these terms appears in his exposition, they could have functioned as explicit building blocks in his ecological-linguistic conceptual machinery. Above all, this machinery consists of the three central elements ‘organism’, ‘environment’, and ‘interaction’. Under his interpretation, language corresponds to the organism. The environment equals in a sociological sense the community, that is, the speech community, and in a psychological sense the mind or, more precisely, the individual mind (see the opening quote in Section 1 above). Finally, in his original formulation he ties together the organism (that is, language) and the environment (i.e., in the first place, the speech community) by means of interaction. Despite the fact that he sometimes alludes to the natural or physical setting of language (1972, 325), his main focus in comparison to Haeckel’s definition of ecology could be portrayed as in Fig. 1. Yet, as has repeatedly been pointed out, e.g., by Garner (2004, 2005), it is difficult to draw completely convincing parallels between language and ecology. One problem is the simile between language and organism. As we saw above (Section 1), Haugen (1972, 325) emphasizes the point that “[t]he ecology of a language is determined primarily by the people who learn it, use it, and transmit it to others” (italics, SE), while the language itself is inert. To boot, in Haugen (1979b, 244) he himself explicitly admits that language is not an organism. As is completely self-evident, language is no actor and its relation to the surrounding world is entirely indirect via its users. Another difficulty relates to the concept of environment. In Haugen’s presentation, we sometimes discern glimpses of the physical environment as well as the psychological environment, i.e., the individual mind, but on the other hand, he says, “[t]he true environment of a language is the society that uses it as one of its codes” (1972, 325; italics, SE). Consequently, it is unclear what exactly constitutes the ecological-linguistic environment. Steffensen and Fill (2014, 7) phrase the matter as follows: Paradoxically, while Haugen took a new ecological direction in linguistics, he also opened up a conceptual problem that has haunted its practitioners for decades: while it is relatively straightforward to delimit a single biological being’s ecology, i.e. more or less the habitat that it covers during its lifetime, it is not at all obvious what a language’s environment might be. Due to this indeterminacy, very different approaches to language ecology have seen the light of the day since Haugen. Even the concept of interaction (reciprocal action, mutual influence) appears knotty. A biological organism influences as actor both its abiotic (non-living, physical) and its biotic (living) environment. Parts of the biotic environment influence also actively the individual organism, whereas the abiotic environment most commonly provides the setting, within which organisms exist. Languages as such hardly affect the physical or abiotic environment. Nor do the structures and the lexicons of languages actively affect society (i.e., as actors), and a more indirect influence of language structure on thinking as is presupposed in the so-called Sapir/Whorf-hypothesis (linguistic relativism) has turned out to be difficult to demonstrate patently and conclusively (cf., e.g., Lucy, 1999). Consequently, the influence relating to language extends primarily from society, i.e., the speaker collective, to language, not in part vice versa. Interesting is Haugen’s statement that “[t]he analysis of ecology requires not only that one describe the social and psychological situation of each language, but also the effect of this situation on the language itself” (1972, 334). In a similar vein, he says that “[l]ike animal or human species, the forms of given languages are shaped to the needs of their environment” (1987a, 50). He adduces no effect of language on the surrounding world. A schematized rendition of how the ecological, human ecological, and ecological-linguistic approaches view acting agents and active influence appears in Fig. 2.12 To sum up, language is not an organism, and the active interaction between language and its environment reduces in the first place to the influence on language by society, i.e., the linguistic community. 8. Varying emphases in Haugen’s definitions of language ecology We now turn to the object of study of language ecology, which according to Haugen’s original definition is the “interactions” between a given language and its environment (1972, 325) or “the interaction of languages and their users” (1972, 329). However, we must recall here that in biology both Haeckel and Reiter emphasize the organism’s adaptation to surrounding organic and non-organic conditions, but do not hint at any absolute mutuality in that adaptation (Section 2). Later

12 Here, I choose the word ‘physical’ in order to stress more strongly also the artificial surroundings created by humans, such as buildings, roads, cities, etc., in comparison with naturally existing abiotic milieus. For the interaction of languages in the minds of bi- or multilingual individuals, see Section 9.

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Fig. 2. Schematized presentation of actual differences between language ecology (under one interpretation) and ecology / human ecology (5 ¼ mutual influence, 0 or * ¼ unilateral influence).

(1979b, 244), Haugen exchanges without comment the concept of interaction for that of “relations” and “interrelationship” between languages and their environments. This, then, is comparable to the expression “relations” in Haeckel’s definition. Finally, Haugen (1979a [1987a, 27]) chooses the wording “language in relation to its human environment”, a formulation which reminds us of the opinion, advanced by him and several other participants in the Burg Wartenstein conference, that “a complete description must treat languages in their symbiotic setting” (Burgoyne, 1971, 2). Hence, the focus of Haugen’s definitions shifts in the following manner: INTERACTION

/

INTERRELATION

/

LANGUAGE IN RELATION

The fluctuations of the definitions apparently have to do with the fact that the concept of interaction in the scenarios of biological and human ecology, where an organism/human can interact with other organisms/humans, does not admit of being directly transposed onto the connection between language and society, where language is not a biotic agent.

9. The scope of language ecology The scope of the object of study is a matter that is especially important for research that strives for an all-embracing holistic perspective. Let us here consider two facets of Haugen’s conception. One facet relates to the role of psycholinguistics in language ecology. “Language exists only in the minds of its users”, says Hagen, and “[p]art of its ecology is therefore psychological: its interaction with other languages in the minds of bi- and multilingual speakers” (Haugen, 1972, 325). In view of this statement, the psycholinguistic domain ought to require a thorough treatment. As Sune Vork Steffensen puts it (p.c. 7/31/2014; cited by permission): Økologi-begrebets dobbelt-forankring i en psykologisk og en sociologisk virkelighed er jo faktisk et ret stærkt alternativ til Chomskys competence-performance distinktion (hvor kompetence netop er en psykologisk realitet, mens performance er en sociologisk realitet). Mens Chomskys kartesiske distinktion per definition aldrig kan indgå i samme forskningsprogram, kan en økologisk dobbelt-forankring faktisk have en vis udsigelseskraft i.f.t. at forstå vekselvirkningen mellem social og psykologisk realitet. [The double roots of the ecology concept in a psychological and a sociological reality is in fact a fairly strong alternative to Chomsky’s competence-performance distinction (where competence is precisely a psychological reality, while performance is a sociological reality). Whereas by definition Chomsky’s Cartesian distinction can never be part of the same research program, the double roots of ecology may actually have some explanatory power with respect to how we understand the interaction between social and psychological reality.] Nevertheless, the topic of the psychological domain and of its relation to the sociological dimension is speedily dropped in Haugen’s article in favor of sociolinguistic issues of the kinds that are familiar from Haugen’s previous work.13

13 More generally and arguing from a modern ecolinguistic perspective, García Lenza (2011, 496) even holds that “en realidade o fundador da ecoloxía da lingua debe ser caracterizado como un sociolingüista . máis que como un ecolingüista” [“in reality, the father of the ecology of language ought to be characterized as a sociolinguist . rather than as an ecolinguist”].

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Another facet involves the modalities of human communication. Several research questions in Table 4 are strongly geared to spoken and written language. Question 6 deals with the writing tradition that is associated with a given language. Question 7 concerns the degree, to which the form of the written language has been standardized. Question 4 is about what other languages the speakers use, and Question 1 asks how each individual language should be genetically and structurally classified. The impression is that what is at issue here is spoken and written languages. To refer again to the projected CAL survey, Burgoyne (1971, 3) reports that the participants in the Burg Wartenstein symposium discussed “[t]he question of whether the project should be broad enough to include coverage of substitutional systems for language (e.g. sign language, whistling, and drum languages)”, among which the study of sign language has become prominent in recent research (cf. Pfau et al., 2012). This discussion has had no impact on Haugen’s article. Nor does non-verbal communication in general figure in the article (cf. now, for example, Hinde, 1972; Knapp, 1978; Manusov and Patterson, 2006).14 Notwithstanding his holistic ambitions, Haugen (1972) disregards such complementary systems of communication and the ways in which they may be thought to work in union with spoken and written language. In his review of Enninger and Haynes (1984) published fifteen years later, he notes, though: “If we consider non-verbal signs as in some sense linguistic, there can be no objection to including them under the term ‘language ecology’” (Haugen, 1987b, 81). In the same place (1987b, 81), Haugen admits, referring to the language ecology enterprise as a whole, that “[t]he concept was probably too broad for any sane research program, but it seemed worthwhile to me that one should aim for the stars”. 10. The relation of language ecology to other branches of scientific inquiry Haugen’s proposal raises, moreover, the intricate problem of how to range language ecology among other research concerns or research areas and how mark it off from these. In other words, how are we to demarcate language ecology from other research agendas or fit it into a classification of sciences and scientific fields (cf. Eliasson, 1987). As indicated in Table 4, Haugen enumerates a number of scientific areas that are implicated in his ten research questions. Here it emerges that the aims of language ecology overlap considerably with those of miscellaneous linguistic sub-disciplines such as philology, language history, dialectology, descriptive linguistics, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, sociology of language, ethnolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and so forth (cf. 1972, 327). The text does not, however, make it clear exactly how these apparent overlaps are to be understood. Most easily, we may associate them with a view of language ecology as a research perspective alone d a point of view that may be pursued within the bounds of various sub-disciplines. But when Haugen says that language ecology is a research field, an uncertainty arises as to where a given scientific problem in reality belongs, to language ecology or to some other linguistic sub-discipline. To mention just one instance of unclear responsibilities, is it up to language ecology to classify languages genetically (part of Question 1, Table 4) or should this remain the task of historical linguistics? Or alternatively, is language ecology perchance to be seen, at a more general level, as a kind of meta-discipline (cf. Lechevrel, 2010a, 163)? In this case, genetic language classification would trivially be a task of language ecology, because it is a task of what would be a ‘sub-field’, viz., historical linguistics. Still another complication ensues when d as we saw in Section 5 d Haugen on the one hand claims that “sociolinguistics is an ‘ecology of language’ and therefore part of the ecology of society” (Haugen, 1978, 7) and on the other hand that “‘language ecology’ is . one aspect [italics, SE] of the interdisciplinary field of sociolinguistics or the sociology of language” (1979b, 245). But then again, he remarks: “I have been asked why one should say ecology rather than sociolinguistics. I thought of the former as somehow much broader than the latter” (Haugen, 1987b, 81). The picture becomes even more complicated when he underlines the point that “the preservation of language [a topic of language ecology, SE] is a part of human ecology, which in turn is a branch of the larger disciplines of sociology and political science” (1985, 4f.). Possibly, he may at times have had something like the relations in Fig. 3 in mind. Human ecology would then be located in the intersection of political science and sociology, and sociolinguistics would be a sub-field of human ecology. But whether language ecology is merely to be seen as an aspect of sociolinguistics or whether sociolinguistics is in effect a part of language ecology as in Fig. 3 is not entirely settled by Haugen’s statements cited above. Nor does he address how linguistics in its entirety is to be built into such a disciplinary structure. 11. Theory, model, methodology, heuristic function Still another essential issue is if and to what degree language ecology is influenced by theory and model construction as well as methodology in other scientific fields. The considerable theoretical and methodological stringency of biological ecology, the many principled arguments in human ecology, the seething interest in linguistic theory in Cambridge, MA, where Haugen worked at the time of writing his article, as well as the deliberations at the Burg Wartenstein symposium might all have been expected to inspire a consideration of theoretical issues in language ecology. Burgoyne (1971, 2f.) reports from the gathering: It was emphasized several times during the symposium that, generally speaking, linguistic theory and linguistic data are not integrated as well as they should be. Significant theoretical developments are often not used in descriptions, and there is disregard of available data in theoretical formulations, with the result that the theory is unconvincing and

14 And even less, of course, the quite dissimilar area of inter-species, or more exactly, human-animal, communication, even though this should carry a special interest precisely for research focusing on ecology.

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POLITICAL SCIENCE

SOCIOLINGUISTICS

LANGUAGE ECOLOGY

HUMAN ECOLOGY

SOCIOLOGY Fig. 3. The relation between sociolinguistics, language ecology and human ecology within the bounds of political science and sociology under one imaginable interpretation of Haugen’s position.

the set of data is a raw, unorganized body of materials. The hope was expressed that a coordinated description program would contribute to a better synthesis between linguistic theory and linguistic data collecting. These circumstances could have induced Haugen to comment on the theoretical side of his proposal, not least as in a later article he aims at “a general survey of some theoretical principles” for language ecology (1979b, 244). Certainly, any even vaguely systematic theoretical treatment would go beyond the limits of a brief paper, but he does not actually enter upon any discussion at all of theory and ecological-linguistic principles and parameters. Neither does he remark upon general principles in bio-ecology or human ecology. Haugen is above all an empirically oriented researcher, and for him language ecology is in the first place “descriptive and normative” (Haugen, 1979b, 247). Characteristically, he speaks of his language ecology as “[a] descriptive ecology of language” (1979b, 246). Nor does Haugen in his 1972 article try to grapple with the task of constructing a model. In a later article entitled “An ecological model for bilingualism” and in reprinted form “An ecological model” (1979a [1987a, 30]), he adds a few graphic diagrams to describe variations of linguistic form in the speech community. The concrete contents of these diagrams derive from sociolinguistics and the sociology of language. Haugen discusses no methodology that would be specific to language ecology, which is natural, considering that methodology for the most part constitutes no decisive criterion for defining scientific disciplines (cf. Hawley, 1944 [1961, 148], Eliasson, 1987, 24). If instead language ecology is to serve basically as a metaphor, a methodological account might have been more in place, explaining, among other things, how the metaphor could crucially affect the choice of research methods. In contrast, Haugen emphasizes that the concept of language ecology has a very important heuristic function. Apparently, its heuristic value ensues above all from the research questions that the researcher puts to the data. Nonetheless and as has often been pointed out (e.g., by Garner, 2004), the transposition of ultimately bio-ecological notions to the realm of language does not result in any internally coherent or uniform ecological-linguistic conception or approach. 12. Haugen’s ecological-linguistic perspective: final remarks In conclusion, the term ‘ecology’ has by now a one and a half century long history. The German zoologist Ernst Haeckel coined the word in 1866, Hanns Reiter employed it in a botanical treatise in 1885, and in the 1890’s, botanists such as the Dane Eugenius Warming contributed significantly to its spread in biology. In the 20th century, it was adopted in other scientific disciplines, including sociology, psychology and linguistics. At the beginning of the century, the formation ‘human ecology’ appears. Several scholars credit the sociologists Robert Park and Ernest Burgess with having introduced it in 1921, but Ellen Swallow Richards and others had used it earlier within the fields of home sanitation and geography. In linguistics, the Englishman John Trim applied the term ecology to linguistic phenomena already in 1959, Carl Voegelin and the psycholinguist Vivian Horner made use of it in the 1960’s, and Einar Haugen at the beginning of the 1970’s. Haugen was, in addition, the first to provide the notion with a bit more substance, for which reason he is generally regarded as the founder of language ecology. Haugen’s classical essay “The ecology of language” from 1971/1972 is fundamentally a reaction to the dominant trends in 20th century linguistics that strongly emphasized language as a static independent system, detached from its communicative context, as well as a response to the concomitant tendency in generative grammar toward extreme idealization and abstraction of the object of study (reductionism). Important for the understanding of his article is, furthermore, the immediate institutional setting, in which he delivered his ideas, as well as his sources of inspiration insofar as these can be ascertained from his presentation. When Haugen presented his idea, he obviously did not intend to put forth a stringently elaborated theory or model. Rather, the paper is a preliminary sketch and a partly informal contribution to the discussion, most aspects of which remain to be further elaborated. The impetus to Haugen’s ecological-linguistic reasoning comes primarily out of sociology, from which he takes the general idea d initially perhaps in part mediated through its occurrence among the general public d while he basically ignores the

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much more detailed conceptual apparatus, theories, and models in zoology and botany. Nor do Haugen’s ecological-linguistic writings show indubitable traces of ecological concepts that were current in psychology at the time. Similarly, a recent surmise that the Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss may have stimulated Haugen’s thinking is difficult to verify in Haugen’s work. In contrast, references to sociological studies are quite manifest. According to Haugen, human languages are inseparably intertwined with and embedded in their respective historical, social, political and cultural contexts. Consequently, linguistics needs to adopt an integrative, holistic approach. In his ten ecological-linguistic research questions, he provides some directions for how ecological-linguistic descriptions should be worked out. Moreover, linguistic communities are always heterogenous, the existence of variation being an inherent characteristic of language. His taxonomy focuses chiefly on how social factors affect the form and use of language, and his brand of language ecology deals therefore to a large extent with linguistic variation. “I have found it fruitful to adopt the widely used term ‘ecology’ and to apply it to the variation of language”, he says in Haugen (1979a [1987a, 27]). Problems in Haugen’s conception include the status of language ecology as a metaphor or a discipline, the transfer of ultimately bio-ecological concepts, terminology, and processes to language, the definition of the object of study, the fixation of the boundaries in relation to other research enterprises, model construction, and theory formation. In the first place, he applies the concept of ecology to language in the form of a metaphor, but at times he speaks of language ecology as a scientific discipline. The difficulty that lies in the translation of biological and social conditions into linguistic ones, leads to a shifting focus in his definitions of language ecology, and its object of study is not well defined. Neither is it clear what are the relations of language ecology to other branches of linguistics and to non-linguistic disciplines. Haugen does not discuss theory and methodology. Model construction plays no role in Haugen (1972), but a few graphic schemas described as models appear in a later publication. He underscores the view that the ecological-linguistic way of looking at data fulfills an important heuristic function. In his review of Enninger and Haynes (1984) sixteen years after the first publication of his original ecology article Haugen states that “[w]e are a long step farther ahead in seeing the establishment of a paradigm of language (or sign) ecology” (1987b, 82). Nevertheless, Haugen’s (1971, 1972) essay has not actually resulted in the development of a uniform ecological-linguistic research field or research paradigm. But then neither ecology, nor human ecology is a homogenous discipline. To McIntosh (1985, 2), ecology is “at best a polymorphic science”. Paradoxically, too, one of the more central tasks of Haugen’s language ecology has not been implemented to the extent that might have been expected. Crystal (2000, 94, quoting Haugen, 1971, 25) talks about “Einar Haugen’s largely ignored call for a ‘typology of ecological classification’, which would ‘tell us something about where the language stands and where it is going in comparison with the other languages of the world’”. As for its effect especially outside linguistics, that is, its influence on “general ecological thinking”, Crystal (2000, 98) speaks of “Haugen’s unjustly neglected paper”. On the other hand, the paper has had a noticeable impact in several branches of linguistics proper and has inspired several brands of ecologically oriented linguistic research. The foremost contribution of his pioneering paper is his plea for a dynamic, holistic perspective on human language.

Acknowledgments The present paper has benefitted from comments by Sune Vork Steffensen (Odense), Roger Gyllin (Uppsala) and an anonymous reviewer for Language Sciences. Ana García Lenza (Santiago de Compostela) kindly provided some typographical corrections.

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